When a computer’s operating system starts malfunctioning, you can’t fix it with a program. Buying an upgrade of Word or Excel won’t fix Windows. You have to go right into the system itself to keep it going. And you have to build a basic new system if it keeps crashing.
Like computers, society has specialized programs: schools, police, courts, health care systems, and the highly specialized private sector. Like computers, society has an operating system. The heart of that operating system is family, neighborhood, community and civil society: the Core Economy.
Futurist Alvin Toffler captured what this operating system does with a question he puts to CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies: “How productive do you think your workforce would be if it was not toilet-trained?” Now that’s a starting point for re-assessing what we count as “productive labor!”
A physician at a nationally renowned medical school asks first year medical students: “What group of people delivers the most health care in this country?”
Doctors? No.
Nurses? No.
Allied health professionals? No.
Just compute the number of days school children are sick; then add infant care, preventive medicine, and chronic conditions. The correct answer is “mothers.”
Who teaches children:
- to walk?
- to talk?
- to obey the rules?
- to tell the truth?
- to avoid harming themselves?
- to avoid harming others?
Who produces a workforce that:
- gets up in the morning?
- gets places on time?
- knows it is wrong to steal and lie?
Mothers, fathers, grandparents, families and those institutions that impart moral values.
Who keeps neighborhoods safe, keeps violence down? A $51 million study extending over ten years by renowned researchers from Harvard, Columbia and the University of Michigan finally pinned down the critical factor. They called it “collective efficacy” – which turns out to mean: neighbors stopping kids from painting graffiti, having fights, hanging out on street corners. It is an invisible local culture that boils down to looking after each others’ kids.
We cannot fix the old operating system with specialized programs operated by professionals that stop when the money runs out. Schools cannot raise our children; police cannot create safe neighborhoods; doctors can provide medicine and surgery but it takes more than that to be healthy; and officials cannot make democracy work without
an alert, engaged citizenry. If we are candid, the operating system that is still sputtering along runs on seemingly free and cheap labor- exacted from the subordination
of women, exploitation of immigrants, and discrimination based on ethnicity. Now, that labor is disappearing as mothers go off to work, as more and more families are headed by a single adult, as grandparents move out, as minorities and immigrants secure more equal opportunity. The time available to enable the Core Economy to function has dropped dramatically. Money purchases only a partial substitute and we never have enough.
The labor supply that kept the Core Economy functioning has dwindled. We can’t just go back to the old operating system. We can’t just do a patch job. We can’t replace families, but we do need to strengthen them with new kinds of extended family. That’s what Time Banking seeks to do, by rebuilding and upgrading society’s operating system – based on valuing all human capacity, honoring all contribution, generating reciprocity, and building social assets.
The Five Prinicples:
- an asset perspective – each one of us has strength
- honouring real work – the work the market fails to value
- reciprocity – empowering the recipient
- community – acknowledging our interdependence
- respect – each voice is owed a listening
Copyright of Holy Cross Centre Trust 2010
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